Allow SFDC Contacts to be the source of truth in Gainsight instead of Company Person/Person

I think the Person architecture is over-engineered and, a pain to work with. Data loads through rules instead of a 1:1 connection, the connectors themselves are difficult, and the result is a steady stream of duplicates that are hard to manage at any scale.

I'd love the option to rely solely on SFDC Contact instead. The human-first intent behind Person made sense on paper — give Gainsight contacts a real identity beyond just a CRM record — but in practice it's created ongoing admin overhead and an inevitable delta between Gainsight and Salesforce that end users can never wrap their heads around.

Short of that, the compromise is a genuinely solid connector that keeps Person in sync with SFDC natively, without me having to babysit it. Every company I've worked at has eventually needed a dedicated cleanup project for Gainsight Person data. That's time I'd rather spend on work that actually moves the needle for CS.

I could not agree with this more and wish I had  x  votes to give this.

Ever since Gainsight NXT arrived and GS shifted away from allowing Salesforce Contacts to be used for things like external attendees, etc. contact management has been a blight on productivity, introducing unnecessary administrative overhead and confusion for both admins and end users. 

As ​@spencer_engel noted, Gainsight needed a contact management function that wasn’t tied to Salesforce so they could expand their footprint beyond Salesforce. I get it. But for those of us who remain dependent on Salesforce, and upstream data management processes and hygiene (or lack thereof) out of our direct control, the People model is an absolute nightmare trying to keep in sync between platforms and trying to explain to users why there are two different, but same entities, that must be kept in sync.

​@spencer_engel covered well the list of common issues we run into.

As a supporting example, I discovered recently that our community management team has been changing the email address and account assignments on existing Contacts (rather than creating a new Contact on the target account and flagging the old Contact as no longer active) which created this issue where the Person record gets it’s email address changed (because SFDC Contact ID and Email are my sync keys) resulting in a new Company Person getting created on the “new” account, and the email address getting updated on the Company Person mapped to the “old” account.  So the “old” CP is still active but with the individuals “new” company domain email address.  And these issues aren’t surfaced in Data Steward.

We also intentionally disabled the ability for users to create Persons/Company Persons in Gainsight because trying to keep them reciprocally synced was proving to be a big challenge, so now we surface Person and Contact reports on C360 instead of the Person widget.

IMHO this is the single most frustrating source of administrative (and end user) headaches, complications and challenges in Gainsight.